The Brow
Real name unknown, the Brow is one of Chester Gould's most famous Grotesques, known for his very prominent brow and no ears. Introduced in 1944, the Brow was a Nazi spy who was monitoring ship movements and radioing the info back to his superiors. After Dick Tracy and Navy soldiers captured the Brow's spy 26, his field glasses which were the most damning evidence fell into the hands of two girls in the room next door named May and June Summer. The sisters were picked up by one of the Brow's henchmen and offered the girls a high paying job and initiated them by breaking their wrists. In order to ensure their cooperation, the Brow put one of the sisters in a diabolical device of his own creation, the spike machine, while the other ran errands for the Brow. On one of the errands, June brought back a gun she had hidden in the rooming house linen closet (which she had stolen from Pat Patton earlier in the storyline), shot and killed the Brow's goons and knocked the Brow unconscious with his head in his own spike machine. June freed her sister and they turned the machine on as they fled. Brow woke up to the sharp pain of the deadly machine, pulling the plug and painfully pulling himself out, almost tearing the flesh right off. The sisters brought Tracy and his men back to the Brows hideout, only to find he had escaped. The Brow hid in a testing casket belonging to an adjoining scientific testing lab, until he was discovered by one of the workers who mistook him for a dead body, and thus susequently suffered a heart attack. Brow took a length of hose and a weight and submerged himself in the pool while the sisters drew a picture of the Brow for Tracy. Brow fled and made his way to the apartment of his compatriot, Doc. His wounds tended to and given a change of clothes, their next move was to kill the treacherous sisters. Knowing that they were dead girls walking, Tracy suggested they be put in a safe house, Officer Murphy gave them a police escort in a taxi. The Brow and Doc forced the cab off a bridge into the river. Murphy managed to escape, but the driver and the sisters drowned. The car being identified, Brow and Doc split up. Brow hid on a beach hidden under a towel. Unknown to anybody, Brow was on the same beach as WAC Tess Trueheart (Tracy's girlfriend), and her gas coupons blew out of her purse and were picked up by the Brow. Doc rejoined the Brow and they stole Tess's license plates, which they matched with the number on the 12 coupons. Tess tried to stop them but was knocked out by the Brow with bolt cutters. The police followed the Brow to a barn theatre where the coupons slipped out of his pocket and found by one of the stage hands. Tracy closed in on the Brow, but was injured when the villain threw a lightning rod at Tracy, stabbing him in the shoulder. As the Brow fled by car, one of the uniformed officers and Patton shot the Brow from different spots, cutting through his forhead. He was able to drive to a vast, empty gravel pit, where he was found by Gravel Gertie, the homely owner of the gravel pit. Blinded by the blood on his head, he couldn't see the ugly face of the beautiful-voiced, silky haired woman who took him in. She tended to his wounds with an old fashioned remedy of soot and spider webs, and hid him when a recovered Tracy, Patton and the police. The Brow had fallen in love with his benefactor just by her voice and hair, and her aiding him, but when he took off the bandages and saw her face for the first time, he was horrified and attempted to flee, but was stopped by the hag. In the struggle, the Brow knoecked over a kerosene lamp, setting the place on fire. Gertie's hair was set on fire and she ran out fo of the house, into a small pond in the pit, where she revealed to Patton who found her that the Brow was in there with her. Thinking Tracy went in after him, Pat went back to the house, trying to get him to forget about the Brow and save himself. The Brow had actually escaped and Tracy found him fleeing the house into some bushes. Tracy shot a few rounds into the bushes, getting the Brow to come out. Tracy beat up the Brow in retaliation for the injury he gave him earlier. Both Gertie and the bloodied Brow were taken to the top floor of the jail where the Brow's wounds were being tended to. Gertie meanwhile swiped Officer Callahan's gun and tossed it to the Brow urging him to kill the officers. Struggling to to release the gun's safety while in handcuffs, Tracy threw an ink well at the Brow's head, causing him to fall backward out the window to his death, impaled by a flagpole "bearing the flag of the country he tried to harm". A few decades later, it was revealed that The Brow had a son who looked exactly like his father, who was in love with and teamed up with Angeltop Jones, daughter of Flattop Jones Sr. who was also a thorn in Tracy's side in 1944 Known Relatives *Son Known Associates *Joe (deceased) *Turtle (deceased) *Ship Spotter 26 *Hantz *Agent 12 *Doc *May and June Summer (deceased) *Gravel Gertie Plenty